Carly Fiorina says the Chinese ‘don’t innovate’

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO and current Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina apparently doesn’t think very highly of the Common Core education policy or of China’s ability to innovate.

How are those two things related? Well, Fiorina has criticized proponents of Common Core who think the policy will help U.S. students compete with Chinese students in subjects like math and science. The 2016 presidential hopeful told Iowa political video blog Caffeinated Thoughts earlier this year that the U.S. education system should not be modeled after China’s. Chinese students may test well, she said, but they fall short when it comes to innovation.

BuzzFeed pulled this quote from Fiorina’s video interview, in which she cited her years of business experience in China:

‘I have been doing business in China for decades, and I will tell you that yeah, the Chinese can take a test, but what they can’t do is innovate,’ she said. ‘They are not terribly imaginative. They’re not entrepreneurial, they don’t innovate, that is why they are stealing our intellectual property.’

Fiorina has broached this subject before, arguing in her book, Rising to the Challenge: My Leadership Journey, thatChina’s educational model is “too homogenized and controlled to encourage imagination and risk taking.”

The former HP HPQ chief executive’s political experience is limited to her failed 2010 U.S. Senate bid. Fiorina’s tenure as HP CEO ended in 2005, when the company’s board forced her to resign following years of stagnant profits and a massive, ill-advised merger with Compaq.

Ex-staffer: ‘I’d rather go to Iraq than work for Carly Fiorina’

Carly Fiorina apparently left a trail of unpaid, unhappy campaign staffers after her unsuccessful 2010 U.S. Senate bid. According to Reuters, the former HP CEO and 2016 Republican presidential hopeful waited more than four years to give her campaign staff the compensation they were promised.

“Federal campaign filings show that, until a few months before Fiorina announced her presidential bid on May 4, she still owed staffers, consultants, strategists, legal experts and vendors nearly half a million dollars,” Reuters reported.

Twelve ex-Fiorina campaign workers told Reuters that, if given the chance to work with Fiorina again, they’d rather not. One anonymous senior staffer reportedly said they’d prefer to be sent to Iraq. Ouch.

To be sure, political campaigns often spend beyond their means and end up not having the funds to pay their staff. In many cases, the candidates themselves wind up footing the bill. In the end, Fiorina’s staffers got their paychecks.

Carly Fiorina came to disrupt

It would be impossible, at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, to forget that you are at TechCrunch Disrupt. Beyond the startup conference’s ubiquitous neon green signage, a deep male voice casually chants “Tech-Crunch… Disrupt” alongside the techno beats that thump in the background. Your senses insist: Disruption is all around you.

On stage, Carly Fiorina embraced disruption. The former CEO of Hewlett-Packard HPQ, who recently announced her bid for the Republican presidential nomination, wanted to make one thing clear to the conference’s audience of hackers, entrepreneurs and techies: She plans to disrupt the American government.

Fiorina’s message could paraphrased thusly: The status quo is bad. Big government is bad. Technology can disrupt the status quo and fix the government.

And, “Technology is a disruptor in how we re-engage citizens on the process of government.”

And also, “Technology is a tool [that can be used to] fundamentally to disrupt the status quo.”

And finally, America is “losing the sense of limitless possibility that has defined our nation,” she declared. (At that statement, a single “woo” erupted from the back of the packed auditorium.)

As if it were a novel idea, Fiorina suggested that politicians should use technology to solicit ideas and feedback from its citizens. “How many people vote for American Idol on their cell phones every week?” she asked. “What if, in addition to that, we had citizens engaging in a conversation, maybe with their president about what they want to see happen?” Later, she admitted she feels the “generation gap” in technology and that she “just doesn’t get” certain apps that are popular with young people.

In addition to Fiorina’s pro-disruption message, she touted her business bonafides, noting that “politics is a fact-free zone” but business, which is based on numbers, is not. She didn’t gloss over her exit from HP, quipping, “You forgot to mention I got fired in a boardroom brawl” to her interviewer. Nor did she gloss over the massive layoffs she enacted in that role.

And yes, she’s aware of Carlyfiorina.org, a website created to shame her for those layoffs. (“You can’t buy every domain name. You just can’t,” she said.)

Fiorina spun the layoffs during her tenure into a positive, noting that she led HP to growth during the post-dotcom bubble recession and that it took some difficult decisions.

Did Carly Fiorina read the FCC rules she’s railing against?

Carly Fiorina is no fan of the FCC’s recent net neutrality rules, suggesting that she’d advocate for different technology policies if elected president next November. But given what she said today during an interview at TechCrunch Disrupt, it’s unclear if she’s actually read them.

Here is an excerpt of the conversation between Fiorina and TechCrunch’s Sarah Lane:

Fiorina: One of the things I think government shouldn’t be doing is trying to regulate, in some bureaucracy, how innovation progresses in the technology industry. So I think it’s a terrible thing, for example, that the FCC just issued—without anyone commenting on it or anyone voting on it—400 pages of new regulations over the Internet. It’s not good, it’s not helpful.

Lane: What about all of the public comments that were taken in?

Fiorina: Well, the public comments came as the result of huge pressure from the public, because people said: ‘Wait, we have to be able to look at this.’ I don’t know, I don’t have a lot of confidence that the FCC took into account many of those public comments. Maybe they did, but I don’t see any evidence of it.”

Lane: So the fact that the volume is there doesn’t mean they were taken into consideration?

Fiorina: Not necessarily.

Lane: I think the public would be very disappointed to hear that.

Fiorina: But that’s the thing. It’s an example of a lack of transparency and accountability. Yeah, send in your comment, but what did we do with those comments? Nobody knows. Did we incorporate those comments? Nobody knows.

First, Fiorina suggested that the public only got to comment on the FCC rules because it agitated for the right to comment. This is simply untrue. The public got to comment on the FCC rules because that’s what the FCC—and most other federal agencies—does whenever it’s considering adopting or modifying major regulations. It’s standard operating procedure and even laid out on the FCC’s website.

Second, there was indeed a vote. Not of the American public—Fiorina must know that we don’t have federal referenda on policy—but of five FCC commissioners who were appointed by President Obama and approved by the U.S. Senate. It went 3-2.

Third, there were not actually 400 pages of regulation. Eighty of those pages were dissents from the two FCC commissioners who voted against the rules being adopted. Another seven pages were statements from the FCC commissioners who voted in favor. Then there were 31 pages of appendices. The main text is still a hefty 282 pages—much of it background rather than rules—that includes an extraordinary number of footnotes which often address… wait for it… comments!

Over and over again, the footnotes refer to specific comments and explain how they were incorporated into the decision-making process. There’s even references to third-party analysis of the comments, to give a sense of where most of the millions of commenters came down on the broader issues.

When Fiorina claims that “nobody knows” if the comments were reviewed, that’s only possible if no one actually read the rules. Or maybe Fiorina is mistaking “nobody” for herself.

How Carly Fiorina got famous

If you’re a supporter of Carly Fiorina, who announced this morning that she’s running for president, you can give Fortune credit for making her famous. If you’re not a Fiorina fan, well, blame us.

In 1998, Fortune selected Fiorina, then 44 years-old and in charge of the largest division at telecom giant Lucent Technologies, to be No. 1 on its first-ever list of the Most Powerful Women in Business. A relative unknown outside the telecom industry (and at the time, profiled only in Investor’s Business Daily), Fiorina landed on Fortune‘s cover. Ten months later, in July 1999, Hewlett-Packard HPQ recruited her to be CEO.

Photograph by E.J. Camp

Fortune reported on Fiorina vigorously throughout her rises and falls—including Carol Loomis’ memorable cover story, “Why Carly’s big bet is failing,” which appeared shortly before the HP board fired her. That story explains her shortcomings as a leader. And so far, her record as a politician is spotty—she failed in her 2010 bid to represent California in the U.S. Senate. But as I say in a recent piece about her emerging role as the GOP’s weapon against Hillary Clinton, Fiorina knows how to fight and she enjoys the battle. So she’s one to watch in the emerging 2016 presidential contest. This excerpt from Fortune‘s 1998 cover story details how Fiorina first rose to power and fame:

To anyone with a sense of traditional career paths, Carly Fiorina’s chance of becoming the most powerful woman in American business would have seemed about as good as, well, a guy’s. In college, where she majored in medieval history and philosophy, she was impractical and unfocused. In law school she was restless, and she dropped out her first year. Job to job–receptionist, teacher–she floated. And when she finally went to AT&T as a sales rep in 1980, she refused to join the savings plan because, she said, no way would she stay past two years.

Fast-forward two decades to 1996. Fiorina is a star in nothing less than the hottest, most important industry in American business: telecommunications. Without it, or the products her company produces, few of us could do our jobs. When AT&T decided to spin off Western Electric and Bell Labs into a new company, Fiorina got plucked from a sea of senior men to direct the strategy, orchestrate the IPO, and lead the search for a name and a corporate image. She did well. When it went public that April, Lucent Technologies’ $3 billion offering turned out to be the biggest, most successful IPO in U.S. history. Now, two promotions later, Fiorina is president of Lucent’s core division, generating some $19 billion in revenues this year…

The key to Fiorina’s success is her independence. “Had anyone told me that I was going to have a career in business, I would have said, ‘No way.’ ” For a time she dreamed of being a classical pianist. Then she settled on her father’s fantasy: the law. “I was in my first year of law school at UCLA,” she recalls, “and I was in this grind, wondering, ‘Why am I doing this?’ ” When she flew to San Francisco and told her father she was quitting, he replied: “Well, I’m very concerned, and I don’t think you’re going to amount to anything.” Says Fiorina: “Quitting law school was the most difficult decision of my life. But I felt this great relief that this is my life and I can do what I want with it.”

She bounced around, from a failed marriage in California to a gig teaching English in Bologna, Italy. At 25 she joined AT&T. Fiorina made her first mark selling telephone services to big federal agencies. Then she took the step that many thought would kill her career. She switched from the sophisticated, mainstream service side of AT&T to the equipment division, Network Systems. “The rap on Network Systems was that it was all guys with 20-inch necks and pea-sized brains. You know, heavy metal bending,” Fiorina says, laughing. “I went because it was a huge challenge, completely male dominated, and outside everything I’d experienced.”

At first she felt jolts of culture shock. The organization was a labyrinth, and its managers were brash and openly confrontational. But Fiorina, audacious and adaptable, earned a reputation as the self-assured young globetrotter who forged complex joint ventures in Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. At 35 she became Network Systems’ first-ever female officer…

Fiorina’s main contributions were her unorthodox ways of thinking and her innate knack for selling. Says Jeff Williams, a partner at Greenhill & Co. who managed the Lucent offering when he was at Morgan Stanley: “She had little experience with finance. She was learning while doing. But Carly is so bright. She was always urging us to think in new ways about positioning the company to investors.”

Position she did. Fiorina even selected Lucent’s logo. One day when Landor Associates, the company’s corporate-image consultants, presented their final recommendations, Fiorina spotted a design that reminded her of her mother’s abstract paintings. It’s the vibrant red logo that’s in Lucent’s ads today.

Now Fiorina is racing ahead. The only criticism you hear of her is that she’s too ambitious–a crack that McGinn and Henry Schacht, Lucent’s recently retired chairman, say is absurd. After the IPO, Schacht made Fiorina president of Lucent’s consumer-products division, where she further proved herself by devising a strategy that eliminated her position. Fiorina decided that consumer products don’t fit with Lucent’s strategy; she sold 60% of the business to Dutch giant Philips. “Remember, this is the company that invented the telephone,” Schacht says, “so the idea of giving up that business wasn’t obvious to any of us at the time. Carly made an absolutely correct decision. And she did it without knowing what her next job would be.”

…She has two grown stepdaughters, a two-year-old step-granddaughter (named Carly), and a husband, Frank, who has surrendered his own career success for hers. Fifteen years ago when Carly and Frank met, he told her, “You’re going to run a big company someday, and I’m going to help you get there.”

Photograph by Michael O’Neill

In her memoir, Tough Choices, Fiorina reflected on this first major story about her in Fortune, as well as later lessons of her roller-coaster career.

Carly Fiorina declares White House bid

Former Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Carly Fiorina announced on Monday she is running for president, becoming the only woman in the pack of Republican candidates for the White House in 2016.

Once one of the most powerful women in the American corporate world, Fiorina announced her bid on ABC News’ “Good Morning America” show.

“Yes, I am running for president. I think I’m the best person for the job because I understand how the economy actually works. I understand the world, who’s in it, how the world works,” she said.

Fiorina registers near the bottom of polls of the dozen or so Republican hopefuls and has never held public office.

But she has already attracted warm receptions at events in the early voting state of Iowa where she is positioning herself as a conservative, pro-business Republican highly critical of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

Fiorina was forced by HP HPQ to resign in 2005 as the tech company struggled to digest Compaq after a $19 billion merger.

For more on the newly-declared presidential candidate, read, How Carly Fiorina got famous, Pattie Sellers’ story about how Fortune put Fiorina on the map.

Former HP CEO Carly Fiorina condemns “crony capitalism”

Carly Fiorina made history as the first woman to become CEO of a Fortune 100 company, but don’t expect the likely Republican presidential candidate to defend big business on the campaign trail. In my wide-ranging interview with Fiorina at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Fiorina sounded less like the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard HPQ and more like U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren—with a twist.

“What we have now is less and less free market, and more and more crony capitalism, “ Fiorina answered when I asked her to respond to Pope Francis’ condemnations of global capitalism. “Government gets bigger and more complicated, so only big companies can thrive…Family businesses and startups are getting crushed,” thereby limiting American economic growth.

Of course, Fiorina is a conservative who wants to cut government while Warren, the liberal senator from Massachusetts, embraces Washington’s reach. But anti-big business themes are woven throughout the message Fiorina is honing as she prepares for the campaign trail. “We have to lessen the power and complexity and reach of big government and big business,” she said. “Small and new companies create two-thirds of jobs and employ half the employees…But for the first the time in United States history, we are destroying more businesses than we are creating.”

A week after she told Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace there is a “90% chance” she will run for President, Fiorina offered details on her foreign policy views at a CSIS Smart Women Smart Power forum, co-sponsored by Fortune. You can watch the interview here, or listen to the entire conversation on the latest iTunes podcast episode of Smart Women Smart Power. Get the podcast by following this link: http://bit.ly/1Itch7U

The Stanford graduate also described her rise from UCLA law school drop-out and “Kelly Girl” temp to the pinnacle of Silicon Valley as CEO of Hewlett- Packard in 1999. She calls H-P “the gray lady that wasn’t growing and wasn’t innovating.”

Fiorina rattled off performance numbers defending her tenure, which ended with the HP board firing her in 2005 with the company’s performance still not showing promised results from her controversial decision to buy a leading competitor, Compaq. “We did that [merger] in the middle of the biggest technology recession in 25 years, and against conventional wisdom,” she said, noting that she favored diversification during a “pure play era” of more narrowly focused tech companies.

“If you lead you will make enemies,” Fiorina said, “It’s the nature of leadership.” She also disputed the suggestion that her abrupt departure–which she ascribed to a dispute over board members leaking confidential information–would hurt her political ambitions. “People need to know the facts,” she said. “One of the things that is good about business [is that] there are actually facts and numbers that are indisputable.

“Sometimes I think politics is a fact-free zone,” the 2010 failed candidate for a California Senate seat quipped.

On foreign policy, Fiorina:

Criticized the White House for “rewarding bad behavior”by continuing nuclear talks with Iran despite Tehran’s flaunting of inspection regimes and destabilizing the Middle East through proxies like Yemen’s Houthis. “Tactically, I also think it’s a huge error for the President of the United States to declare victory in a Rose Garden ceremony when only a framework agreement has been decided,” she added. “What that signals is that this President is now committed publicly to getting this deal. My prediction is that the Iranians will spend the next two months trying to get a better deal. I’ve negotiated plenty of deals. If you want a good deal, you’ve got to be willing to walk away from the table.”

Called for more military support for Arab allies in the Middle East, and for Ukrainians fighting Moscow-backed forces. Of Russian President Vladmir Putin, whom she has met, she said: “Putin is a very formidable man, highly intelligent, highly educated, very cosmopolitan and charming. He is also a man who is focused on power– not ideology…Someone like that will not be stopped unless he senses strength and purpose on the other side.”

Called for U.S. policy and business leaders to form a united front to stop China’s “systematic pilfering of our intellectual property” through cyber spying.

Said deploying U.S. military force “is always a last resort and should only be used in limited way.” Knowing now that Saddam Hussein did not actually possess weapons of mass destruction, she said she would not have supported the Iraq war. She also favors escalated military and intelligence assistance to US allies in the Middle East fighting ISIS and Al Qaeda, rather than sending in American troops.

Ex-HP CEO calls Apple’s CEO a ‘hypocrite’ on gay rights

I’ll be honest. I never saw much to like in Carly Fiorina. Her tenure at Hewlett Packard was a disaster. By the time she was ousted in 2005 the company had lost half its value — earning her a spot on CNBC’s list of the worst American CEOs of all time.

I’m not crazy about her politics, either. She backed John McCain, defended Sarah Palin, opposed gay marriage and called the science on global warming “inconclusive.”

So I was not terribly surprised that she zigged when the rest of Silicon Valley was zagging on “religious freedom” laws, or that she would attack Apple’s CEO by name.

Here’s the money quote:

When Tim Cook is upset about all the places that he does business because of the way they treat gays and women, he needs to withdraw from 90% of the markets that he’s in, including China and Saudi Arabia,” she said Thursday afternoon during an interview with Wall Street Journal reporters and editors. “But I don’t hear him being upset about that.”

This is pure Fox News flimflammery. Where does it say you have to fix the whole world before you start in your own back yard?

It’s the line many on the right were taking last week — before the governors of Indiana and Arkansas saw the light and hastily reversed course.

But it’s one thing for George Will to criticize Tim Cook for doing business in countries that discriminate against homosexuals. He’s a columnist. What does he know?

The ex-CEO of HP — who did plenty of business in those countries — should know better.

Carly Fiorina: The GOP’s weapon against Hillary Clinton?

Is Carly Fiorina the dark horse candidate in the GOP race for President?

That’s what Megyn Kelly proclaimed on Fox News this week, after the former Hewlett-Packard HPQ CEO rallied the Republicans at the Freedom Summit in Iowa and earned rave reviews there. “We must win in 2016,” Fiorina said in an interview on The Kelly File, sounding very much like a candidate. “I don’t think this country can endure four years of Hillary Clinton or Elizabeth Warren.”

Fiorina, 60, hasn’t yet announced she’s running, but as she told Kelly on Monday, “it is something that I’m giving very serious consideration to.” We bet she’ll run…because whatever the challenge she’s faced, Carly possesses more ambition than she first lets on.

Fortune knows Fiorina well. She was on the cover of the very first FortuneMost Powerful Women issue, in 1998, when she had had only one story written about her, in Investor’s Business Daily. At the time, she was a 44-year-old hotshot at Lucent Technologies. She had risen from entry-level sales to the very top of Lucent’s largest division, Global Services, and she had closely advised then-CEO Rich McGinn on the company’s IPO, which was a whopping success. (Ah yes, the gogo days of telecom!)

The daughter of an artist mother and a law professor who prodded her to follow in his footsteps, she rebelled by quitting law school and flying off to Italy to teach—and eventually landed at the entry level of AT&T T, where she went on to shine in sales. Fiorina knew how to sell products, ideas, and herself—and more power to her. I’ll never forget going to Lucent headquarters in New Jersey in the summer of 1998 to interview Pat Russo, who later became Lucent’s CEO, and little-known Fiorina, whose charisma and career story turned out to be captivating.

The next day, I told my bosses that Fiorina was such a comer that she could be No. 1 on our first MPW list. Back then, Mattel MAT was the only Fortune 500 company led by a woman (Jill Barad), so we bumped Fiorina above her and Oprah Winfrey to anoint her the No. 1 Most Powerful Woman in Business.

The world noticed. Ten months later, the HP board recruited Fiorina to be the new CEO of the tech giant—”a Fortune 11 company,” as Fiorina liked to remind investors about the power of her perch.

“My strength is my strength, but it also can be a weakness,” Fiorina once admitted to me, explaining that her style too often worked against her. Granted, she’s suffered the unduly harsh judgement (that narrower band of acceptable behavior) that cripples too many high-flying women leaders. But Fiorina has always struggled to channel her fierce ambition. Passionate in every pursuit and often prickly toward her doubters, she showed her budding political will (and talent for campaigning) when she waged a drag-on proxy fight for HP to buy Compaq. She won. But she lost her more critical leadership campaign when her brashness turned off too many senior managers and her board of directors. The HP board fired her, very publicly, in 2005.

Fiorina moved on advise John McCain in his 2008 Presidential bid, and then she waged a couple battles of her own. She fought off breast cancer in 2009. A year later, she ran against veteran Barbara Boxer to represent California in the U.S. Senate, and she lost.

Now, Fiorina says, she’s interested in running for President because the federal government needs fixing. If—or when—she begins her official campaign, there will be no shortage of ways to attack Fiorina—her failed Senate bid, her ouster from HP, her leadership style—but she’s worth watching because she’s knows how to fight, and she enjoys it.

And for the GOP, she’s already proving herself to be a handy weapon against Hillary Clinton. “Like Hillary Clinton, I too have traveled hundreds of thousands of miles around the globe,” Fiorina said at the Freedom Summit. “But unlike her, I have actually accomplished something. Mrs. Clinton, flying is an activity not an accomplishment.” Ouch! That’s hardly fair or realistic, but we can fantasize: Wouldn’t Carly vs. Hillary be fun?

Watch more coverage on the 2016 Presidential race from Fortune’s video team:

Can Nadella remake Microsoft under his new manifesto?

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently emailed Microsoft employees a speech that I’ll refer to as his “Satya Manifesto.” In it, he points out that the software maker must make fundamental strategic and cultural changes to deliver on his vision of being “the productivity and platform company for the mobile-first and cloud-first world.” He further states: “We will reinvent productivity to empower every person and every organization on the planet to do more and achieve more.”

I was impressed with his willingness to shift Microsoft’s MSFT focus to the mainstream of where the world is moving. Yet, I couldn’t help compare his memo to a 1999 speech by Carly Fiorina after assuming the CEO role at Hewlett Packard HPQ. In her speech she said, “…we are a single global ecosystem – wired, connected, overlapping …”

She then summarized the spirit of the HP Way with the Rules of the Garage:

Believe you can change the world.

Work quickly, keep the tools unlocked, work whenever.

Know when to work alone and when to work together.

Share tools, ideas. Trust your colleagues.

No politics. No bureaucracy. (These are ridiculous in a garage).

The customer defines a job well done.

Radical ideas are not bad ideas.

Invent different ways of working.

Make a contribution every day. If it doesn’t contribute, it doesn’t leave the garage.

Believe that together we can do anything.

Unfortunately, Carly’s noble ambition to have HP return to the principles that had guided it to long-term prior success never was fulfilled. As a venture capitalist, I often see companies that have great vision and a strategy, which if successful, would lead to a leadership position in its arena. The difference between those who achieve this success and those who don’t often comes down to several key factors:

Listening to customers and adjusting products to fit current customer needs

Recruiting and/or acquiring the best talent and then retaining them

Being very flexible and willing to modify basic products and strategies as evidence mounts that this is necessary.

I won’t attempt to analyze why HP failed to re-establish itself as a dominant industry player in areas other than printing. The Satya Manifesto puts down similar rules and, like Carly, correctly identifies some of the ways the world is changing. Now the question becomes how willing is Microsoft to really change? This may depend on whether the following questions are answered positively going forward:

Is Microsoft willing to listen to its customers?

If their customers show a preference for Linux as evidenced by it being the dominant use case on the Amazon cloud, will Microsoft support Linux as vigorously as Windows in its own cloud even if it means some losses for Windows?

If customers are divided on which operating system they want on their phones, will Microsoft offer Linux-based phones in addition to Windows phones?

If Microsoft wants to acquire a new technology, will they be willing to acquire the Best–in-Class company in that space even if it means paying a higher price?

If they acquire best in class companies, will they find a way to retain the top people?

All of the above appear logical consequences of Microsoft fully embracing the Satya manifesto but despite the apparent logic, it isn’t obvious that the company will execute against each of these. They represent a significant change to Microsoft culture and therefore will be hard to achieve even if Nadella is committed to each. Like Carly Fiorina before him, Nadella has become CEO of a company that needs to embrace change. Like Carly, he has correctly outlined changes in the world that require radical adjustment if his company is to maintain leadership. But, as we saw at Hewlett Packard, identifying the theoretical path is only a first step. The end goal can only be reached if Nadella has the will and support to drive radical change within the company.

Soundbytes:

Speaking of Microsoft, Bill Gates’ review of Business Adventures by John Brooks, his favorate business book, is now live on The Wall Street Journal website. It is also live on Gates’ blog, gatesnotes.com or access directly through the Wall Street Journal site.

I have to admire Lebron James who has let his feelings for his home state take priority over bearing a grudge over a less than classy response to his leaving there 4 years ago. Unlike 4 years ago when he was classified as a loser because he couldn’t carry a team (that had the worst record in the league the following year) to a championship, there is now a base that gives him a fighting chance to win without going beyond what is humanly possible.

Mike Kwatinetz is a founding general partner at Azure Capital Partners, where he specializes in software and related infrastructure technologies. This post is from his blog, SoundbytesII.